Good English, Bad Grammar

Colloquialisms and creative license aside, we're talking about proper english for the academic and business worlds. If you want to be taken seriously, it is important to have a decent command of the oral and written language. If English is not your native tongue, there is a larger margin of error and forgiveness for missteps, but if you are a native speaker and you are making a business or academic presentation, you'd better know how to mind you P's and Q's.

Communication is key.
Proper grammar can mean the difference between barely passing and excelling in school, and a promotion or being passed over in the workplace. I've seen many highly capable people hit the "grammatical glass ceiling" in the office because of unpolished language skills. Often they don't even get the job in the beginning. Businesses and bosses want the people who represent them to sound professional and well-educated.

It is true that "Good grammar costs nothing", and it is also true that "Bad grammar could cost you a lot": a job, a promotion or the grade or salary that you want.

It is not necessary to know all the technical terms to get it right. It just takes a little effort and practice and soon it will be second-nature. Another key is to read - a lot. Reading professionally published materials will help to polish one's sense of the language. The best resources need not be boring, but should be qualitiy journalism and literature. Note that advertising should never be relied upon as a source of proper grammar or spelling. This industry often does things incorrectly on purpose (tricky devils)! They want to grab your attention as quickly as possible, so they use short-cuts and a lot of creative license to do it. Dialogue and verbatim qutoes (basically "anything in parentheses") in literature and journalism cannot be relied upon either.

News magazines (Time, Newsweek), business journals, medical journals, science magazines (Discover, National Geographic) are all great resources, and some have nice pictures too!

Please, it hurts to see a language abused!